Question

Currently I have a ListView with a TextView within each child. That TextView is taking in a Spanned string to populate it. I am using the ViewHolder pattern and I am not parsing the Spanned string in getView(). When I switch from a Spanned string back to just a plain string the performance of the ListView’s scrolling increases dramatically. I would like to keep using Spanned because it will format my text correctly on the fly.

Is their a way to increase the performance of my ListView while keeping the string input for my TextViews Spanned?

@Override
public View getView(final int position, View convertView, final ViewGroup parent) {
    final ViewHolder holder;

    if (convertView == null) {
        convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.comment, null);

        holder = new ViewHolder();
        holder.userName = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.comment_user_name);
        holder.date = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.comment_created_date);
        holder.body = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.comment_body);

        convertView.setTag(holder);
    } else {
        holder = (ViewHolder) convertView.getTag();
    }

    User user = array.get(position).getCreatedBy();
    holder.userName.setText(user.getName());
    holder.date.setText(array.get(position).getDateCreated());
    holder.body.setText(array.get(position).getBody());

    return convertView;
}

Answer 1

Although I did not find out the cause of the problem I did find a workaround to fix the problem noted above.

The call getBody() was returning a Spanned object which was causing an unusual amount of garbage collection with each iteration of getView(). When I converted the Spanned to a String the problem goes away. This is the code I modified to fix the problem.

holder.body.setText(array.get(position).getBody()**.toString()**);

Although I would still like to find a solid reason as to why this does occur.